The Helene Hegeman case as a free-appropriation writer is an example of one of the strong negative effects of digital media. Growing up in a media-saturated society, the new generation of artists is strongly influenced by other people’s ideas and has lost the ability to form their own with originality and freshness.
One of the famous excuses is that every story has already been told. Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” wasn’t the first painting in history of a city landscape at night with stars on the sky. However, his work was innovative and showed originality in color, strokes, technique, and perspective. Now tell me, how innovative and original is to copy and paste other people’s words and make a book with them? That is called plagiarism and is banned by most of civilized societies in every shape or form.
Of course, a painting and a story are different artistic mediums. A painting can be made of anything and people don’t have to understand it to appreciate it. A story, in the other hand, has to be understood to be appreciated, it has to make sense to the reader, it cannot be completely subjective. And that is where the point of “every story has already been told” has some strength. Stories will always have the same background, humans and human condition, a common backbone; a hero in a journey, trying to accomplish something, finding obstacles, overcoming odds, winning or loosing the dream, coming to understanding with reality, and finding a resolution.
We can use music as an example, there are only so many chords, however the way a musician arranges those chords using a particular tempo and rhythm is what makes it original and maybe even innovative. Can we say that all songs have already been created? I don’t think so. Why then, when talking about writing do we have to conform?
It is truly sad, no doubt that digital media has many benefits, but has also fed confused and lazy writers. Maybe instead of the hours spent digging for ideas online, contemporary writers (and any kind of artist really) should leave their comfortable chair and travel the world, know other cultures, meet people in a very personal way, explore new beliefs, and experience a world outside of their own. They will realize then, that there is much more to say and write about, that there is something new to be told in a unique and fresh way, that you can tell it as none else can.
By conforming to the idea that there can’t be a new Shakespeare, or a new someone who would enrich the world with an innovative piece of work, is a defeated way of thinking that will pass to the generations to come, our children won’t do more than copy and paste because they will believe that there’s nothing new or revolutionary in them, and what a dull and sad world that would be.
No comments:
Post a Comment